Saturday, January 31, 2015

Staunton, January 31 – The war
Vladimir Putin is conducting in Ukraine is leading not just to the economic
destruction of Russia but to its moral destruction as well, and that in turn is
opening the way for the rise of fascism, Lev Slosberg says. In fact, he argues,
Russia today is becoming “ideally ready” for that horrific system.

In an article in the current issue
of “Pskovskaya Guberniya,” Slosberg, who represents the Yabloko Party in the
regional legislature, argues that the course of war “chosen in essence by one
man” is costing everyone enormously and that “many have already paid with their
lives” (gubernia.pskovregion.org/number_725/01.php).

Despite these costs, the deputy
continues, “Putin has chosen for himself and his country ‘precisely this path
of ‘consolidation of Russian society,” one based on the notion that “’the besieged
fortress of Russia’ is ready to fight with the entire rest of the world. War
for it is life; peace for it is death.”

The longer this war goes
on, the more serious its consequences will be, he continues. “One year of war
has been sufficient for the destruction of the economic successes of the past
ten years,” has already “thrown Russia back two decades,” and is continuing to
do so.

“Russia has neither the
forces nor the means to continue this war for another year,” Slosberg says, but
“everything is being thrown into this pyre of war.”And Putin is not stopping because he believes
he can gain strength by using military force to suppress Ukraine.

But what
the Kremlin leader is doing has nothing to do with seizing land. It is all
about taking revenge against Ukraine for everything its people have decided on –
“for the European choice of the majority of society” and for the ouster of the
Kremlin’s man on the scene, Viktor Yanukovich.

And for
Putin, taking that revenge on Ukraine is absolutely necessary now before a
generation arises in Russia which will make the same choices and thus put an
end to his own rule, Slosberg says. To prevent that from happening, he
continues, Putin will pay “any price” in Ukraine.

He will do
so, the Pskov deputy says, because he is “certain that Russian society supports
him in his desire to take revenge on Ukraine. He is certain that his people are
ready to pay any price, including with their lives, for his policy,” a
conviction that arises from his having raised in Russia “a people of war.”

Putin
believes as well that if he wins militarily, no one will judge him. Only losers
are judged in his understanding. And tragically, he has managed to convince
many Russians who today are the people of war to share that view. “The people
of war greets the president of war.”

As horrific as the economic consequences
of Putin’s war have been, the moral consequences of this kind are still worse: “since
the end of the USSR, Russian society was never in such a horrific moral state
as it is now. Russia today is a country ideally ready for fascism.”

Fascism, Slosberg
continues, “is when millions of people are happy as a result of hatred, when
antagonism shapes the attitudes of the people and when those who think
differently become state criminals.”

“Fascism is
when the state raises a people of war,” when there is a ministry of propaganda
which is what “in essence the entire Russian state power” has become, and when
people become convinced that they must never question the leader’s policies or
his wars, when as now “the people of war” predominate “over the people of
peace.”

Most
Russians think that the Nuremberg trials were only about the military crimes of
the Nazi regime, “but in the framework of [that process] was studied how the fascist
state was created and how an entire people” at the center of Europe fell under
its spell.

At
Nuremberg, it was shown that “even a great people of science and culture does
not have immunity against fascism. Fascism burned up public morality in Germany
with the speed of fire,” and the result was horrific. Its “centuries’ old
culture did not save it from fascism.”

“The people
of war do not need culture” because “the fuel in this conflagration became the
lie, the all-embracing state lie,” with the burning of books symbolizing that
reality.

Putin has
raised up a people of war because in reality “it is very easy to become a
people of war. One need only hate more than love, wish one’s neighbor not good
things but destruction, think that the greatness of the Motherland requires the
denigration of other peoples, and be gladded by participation in their
denigration.”

“A people of war is capable of
destroying its own Motherland because hatred and lies destroy any state and any
society,” Slosberg says, and “the Russian state is rapidly moving toward its
own Nuremberg process, through war,” a movement that is “taking place each day
and each hour.”

“It is very difficult to stop,” he
continues, as difficult as stopping a train coming out of the mountains out of
control. And at present “there are very few people in Russia who are trying to
stop this insanity.”Is there any chance
that they will be able to do so?

“This is the question for the people
of peace,” who in Russia today are far less numerous than “the people of war.”But they should take courage from the following
fact: “a soldier at war always listens to the voice of peace because he wants
to live.” Because that is so, “it is wrong to be silent.”

Staunton, January 31 – Shodi Shabdonolov,
the head of the Communist Party of Tajikistan, says that followers of the Salafi
trend of radical Islam have been trying to join his organization in the hopes
of using it as a Trojan horse to advance their own interests against Dushanbe.

In an interview with the Tajik
Service of Radio Liberty, Shabdolov said that his party does not prevent Muslim
believers from joining but will not admit anyone known to be a follower of a
radical trend, especially one that has been illegal in his country since 2009 (rus.ozodi.org/content/article/26821684.html).

The communist leader said that
Salafis had many times attempted to join his organization’s ranks but that they
had always been met with suspicion and not admitted. He said that he and his
comrades want to do what they can to prevent the Salafis from acquiring yet
another platform for disseminating their radical views.

Radio Liberty noted that on
Thursday, an Iranian news organization had reported that “members of extremist
groups had been directed to penetrate officially functioning political
organizations of Tajikistan in order to propagandize their views.” It is also
possible that some of the Salafis involved in this effort may be Tajiks coming
from Afghanistan.

At present, the Communist Party of
Tajikistan is the third largest party in that Central Asian country, behind the
ruling Peoples Democratic Party and the Islamic Party for the Rebirth of
Tajikistan.

Staunton, January 31 – The Russian
occupation authorities are treating the Crimean Tatars in a manner which fully
corresponds to “the Nazi spirit” because the authorities define them as “’a
lesser race’” that “’the country doesn’t need,’” according to Ayder
Muzhdabayev, a member of the Union of Crimean Tatars and a Russian journalist.

What is on display in occupied
Crimea, he says, is “the attitude of ‘a higher race’ to a lesser’ one. In
unofficial conversations, this is no longer being concealed,” he continues, and
Russian officials openly say: “’You are a small people the country doesn’t
need. It would be better if you didn’t exist. You must subordinate yourselves
to our orders and keep quiet.”

Muzhdabayev says that he wants the world
to know that “the Crimean Tatars feel themselves in Crimea [today] just the way
Jews in Germany felt during the period of the establishment of the Nazi system:
as people without rights who have been clearly given to understand that
anything can be done to them depending on what the authorities want.”

The limits on that, he says, “are
constantly broadening and apparently will broaden still further.” The appeals
of Crimean Tatars to the international community concerning the arbitrary actions
of the occupation authorities and “the armed nationalists connected with them” have
remained “without a response.”

“I never thought,” Muzhdabayev says,
“that the Crimean Tatars both those [he] knows and those [he] doesn’t, would
write and phone him to say: ‘This is becoming impossible to bear,’ ‘they don’t
consider us to be people,’ and even ‘it is better to die than to suffer such indignities.’”

It may seem “horrific,” he
continues, but he feels compelled to say that he is “happy that [his]
grandmother, grandfather, and many other older relatives who were repressed by
Stalin in 1944 did not live to this present time.”

Everyone around the world must
recognize that “what is going on with the Crimean Tatars and their
representatives and social structures in Crimea is systematic mass intimidation
and persecution on the basis of nationality, a moral genocide, accompanied with
threats to personal security, health and life, baseless judicial and
extra-judicial repressions.”

Insisting that he is not “dramatizing”
the situation, Chubarov said that in Russia, there is now “no good sense. Putin
is the Hitler of today, and if his own society does not stop him, then the next
step will be the construction of camps in the vastness of Siberia and the
dispatch there of all those who on the territories he controls who are inclined
against him.”

That the Crimean Tatars are being subjected to an
intensified campaign of persecution has been documented by the SOVA human
rights organization in a new report (sova-center.ru/misuse/news/persecution/2015/01/d31163/).
And that no one has yet come to their aid is becoming the occasion for ever more
anger.

She said that she had called on the OSCE
to organize a mission to Crimea but had not yet received an answer. And when
she asked the Council of Europe to do so, officials there said that “if the
Russian side in Crimea would be ready to accept such a mission, then [the
Council of Europe] would be ready to send one. However, there is still no
answer from the Russian side.”

Staunton, January 31 – Between 40
and 60 percent of Russians under arrest are tortured by their jailors before
they are convicted, according to St. Petersburg criminologist Yakov Gilinsky.
And that means, he says, that approximately four percent of the entire
population of the country is subject to torture every year.

Speaking in Moscow last week,
Gilinsky said that he and his colleagues had studied the situation regarding
torture in five regions of the Russian Federation – St. Petersburg, Komi,
Pskov, Nizhny Novgorod and Chita – in 2005-2006 when they came up with these disturbing
statistics (openrussia.org/post/view/2365/).

The St. Petersburg criminologist
said that he understood perfectly well that he couldn’t ask people “where and
how were you tortured?” To do so would have meant that he and his colleagues
would have been forever denied access to jails and prisons and thus would not
have been able to monitor the situation.

Instead, Gilinsky said, his
researchers asked “what is torture?” and “”how should it be defined?”We told respondents what torture was and then
asked “if you in the course of the previous year … had been subjected to this
as formulated and written down on the questionnaire, then tell us about it.”

He said his survey was as
representative as others conducted in Russia because it involved more than the
usual number of respondents: In St. Petersburg alone, Gilinsky said, he and his
colleagues talked to more than 2,000 people and in the other four regions a
similar number, far more than the 1500 most polling agencies use.

“More than that,” the criminologist
continued, he said he had “been involved in practical work for many years” in
this area. Today, he works in the Academy of the Office of the Procurator
General, and thus it comes as no surprise to him that torture is going on “throughout
the entire territory of the Russian Federation.”

“That is how it was in 2005-2006,”
Gilinsky said. “Today the situation has not improved.”

What should be done?According to the criminologist, a major first step would to
decriminalize half of the actions listed in the Criminal Code. Some of them
should be classified as administrative violations and others should simply be
eliminated altogether.That would reduce
the flow of people through the criminal justice system.

Other actions that should be taken, Gilinsky said, are
the elimination of the death penalty, the creation of an independent judiciary
not controlled by the administration and capable of supervising the jails and
prisons, the establishment of a separate juvenile justice system, and “of
course, the formation of a liberal democratic sense of justice in the
population.”

Moreover, he said, “it is necessary to conduct many
[other] reforms: the reform of the police, the reform of the penal system from
top to bottom,” and the effective introduction of minimal standards of the
treatment of prisoners as proclaimed in Russian and European legislation.

“It would be naïve to hope for the achievement of all
these proposals in contemporary Russia,” Gilinsky said. “But let us hope that
all this will be achieved in a future one.”

Staunton, January 31 – In 1991, when
the Soviet Union was living out its last days, a cartoon appeared in an
American newspaper which perfectly captured the spirit of what was happening in
Moscow and in the West. It showed Mikhail Gorbachev holding a gun to his head
and saying “If you try to stop me, I’ll shoot myself.”

Fears in some Western capitals that
any “pressure” on Gorbachev, even after he ordered the killings in Lithuania
and Latvia, might lead to the collapse of his regime and even the
disintegration of the Soviet Union certainly acted as a constraint on those
governments, although they did not prevent Gorbachev from being ousted and the
USSR from falling apart.

Commenting on the decision of the EU
to keep existing sanctions in place and its promise to toughen them “if the
situation deteriorates,” Ogryzko says that this position has both positive and
negative aspects. On the positive side, it shows that Moscow’s hopes for a Greek
veto on the extension of sanctions were misplaced.

But on the negative side, he points
out that “unfortunately, the EU sanctions have turned out to be quite weak and
are not hitting Russia as they should after all that has happened. What is
especially disturbing are the comments of some that the EU may do more if
Moscow launches a frontal attack on Mariupol or other Ukrainian cities.”

“It seems to me,” the Ukrainian diplomat
says, “that this goes beyond all possible and impossible limits. After the
terrorist acts in Vonovakha, Donetsk and especially in Mariupol to speak about
the introduction of sanctions ‘in the event that the situation deteriorates’ is
simply to help the aggressor” because it gives Moscow no reason to stop.

“The reason behind such weak
decisions,” he continues, “is that people in the West fear an instantaneous
collapse of Russia which would be completely possible if serious economic
sanctions were introduced,” sanctions like the exclusion of Russia from the
SWIFT banking settlement system.

Various
Russian commentators have suggested that more serious sanctions could lead to a
Russian collapse. And “apparently,” Ogryzko says, “the economic interests of
the West do not allow it to take this step. Now, [its member governments] will
wait until the latest ‘if,’ the next Mariupol, the next attack of Russian
forces.”

Friday, January 30, 2015

Staunton, January 30 – The old
left-right continuum in Russian politics with its differences between
conservatives and reformers ceased to be relevant as the basis for analysis and
understanding with Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and the formation of a populist
left-right alliance of support, according to Aleksandr Morozov.

In a commentary in “New Times,” he
argues that “with the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the
east of Ukraine, all the political space of the Russian Titanic together with
its tables, chairs and orchestra slid to one side” and came together in ways
few expected (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/93246).

“All the old political distinctions
lost any meaning before both former reformers and former conservatives and even
national Bolsheviks and national organizations like Barkashov’s and socialists
like Kagarlitsky found themselves in one multi-voiced crowd shouting ‘Send the
tanks to Kyiv! Fascism will not pass!’”

“The so-called ‘peace party’ in such
circumstances,” Morozov continues, “cannot possibly be qualified as liberals.
What kind of liberalism is in there in wartime?In wartime it can be only ‘a fifth column’ and ‘traitors to the
motherland.’”

What has
formed instead is “a broad left-right populist consensus,” one that is quite
familiar to historians of interwar Europe and especially of Germany and Italy.
Leftwing political thought has always characterized fascism as “reactionary and
conservative,” but there is more to it than that as recent analysis has shown.

Today, many historians are more inclined to talk about the movements of
that time in terms of populism rather than in terms of a left-right continuum.
Indeed, it seems, Morozov says, that “each new stage of globalization and the
inclusion in communications of new masses generates a reaction in the form of
an epidemic spread of populism.”

However
that may be, he continues, “one must not say that this was or is an exclusivey
conservative reaction.” In the Russian case now, “the populist synthesis
includes within itself both former revolutionaries like Eduard Limonov and such
died in the wool state types like Ramzan Kadyrov.”

“The
fate of this ‘post-Crimean populist consensus,” Morozov says, “is still
unclear. It may break apart or it may form the basis of a new state system.” It
may lead to “Italian fascism or Hitlerism” or it may go off in another
direction altogether.“The next three
years,” he suggests, will provide the answer.

One of
the reasons for uncertainty is that past analogies are useful only up to a
point and “populism mutates” regularly.Putin’s
“’post-Crimea consensus’” is in the very early stages, and where it will lead
to could vary from judicial pressure on the Sakharov Center to the smashing of
its windows by mobs while the police look on.

Russia’s
current “post-Soviet ‘rightists’ always were not completely conservative
because they called not for the preservation” of a real past in the present but
rather for the construction of something “impossible, a kind of conservative
utopia” be it “Stalinism, Byzantium or the Russian 19th century.”

“All of them conceive the war in the
Donbas not simply as a war for territory but as a struggle for the construction
of a new society corresponding to their national socialist idea in a separate
gubernia.”As such they are truly “conservative
revolutionaries” who join together both left and right ideas.

“Now, this right-left consensus
works in the following way.” It draws on popular support from below and uses
television from above, and it is seeking to form “a new social fabric based on
anti-Americanism, the opposition of Putin to weak Western leaders, support for
Russian values against the degenerate West, state sovereignty, and the
militarization of public life.

As one can see, Morozov says, “the
right, like the left, has dissolved in this post-Crimea consensus.”

“The ‘televized Ukraine’ has been
transformed into a field of virtual war with the West and the United States for
millions while the Donbas is a real war for several thousand citizens with
Russian passports. No one knows what this new populism will become when it
matures.” But one thing is clear: “the degeneration of society is proceeding
very quickly.”

Staunton, January 30 – In a move
that recalls Mikhail Gorbachev’s times and that the current Kremlin leader may
come to regret, Vladimir Putin has called on Russia’s regions to “formulate their
own anti-crisis plans and independently search for sources of financing for new
infrastructure projects” (bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2015/01/150129_putin_regions_on_their_own).

Those words which recall Gorbachev’s
outline of his thinking in December 1984 before he came to power and which signaled
the end of massive Soviet interregional transfers of resources played a major
role in triggering not just new thinking about economics but also about the
future political relationship between
Moscow and the now-independent union republics.

Yesterday, Putin called on the
leaders of Russia’s federal subjects to come up with their own “action plans”
to cope with the crisis in the way that they did in 2008-2009. “Now, it is
necessary to do the same thing.” He added that Moscow will support those it can
but that the regions will also have to look for their own funding as well.

Two Russian experts with whom the
BBC’s Russian Service spoke were quite dismissive of Putin’s suggestion, seeing
it as a reflection of his being out of touch with the situation in the country
and at best too little too late.

Natalya Zubarevich, director of
regional programs at Moscow’s Independent Institute for Social Policy, said
that Putin’s remarks show that he “poorly understands what is taking place in
the regions,” a reflection of a breakdown in communications between the Kremlin
and regional leaders.

Were the Kremlin leader aware of the
actual situation, one in which the regions can do little because they are
facing rising debt, falling tax revenues, and cuts in federal subsidies, he
would know, Zubarevich continued, that there was no possibility for the regions
to take the kind of steps he called for.

And Karen Vartapetov, deputy
director of Standard&Poors for Russia, agreed, noting that the regions face
the challenge of extinguishing far more debt in the coming year than they have the
capacity to do on their own and that Moscow is doing far too little to help
them whatever the Kremlin suggests.

This situation has arisen, the
ratings analyst said, because of Putin’s directives in May 2012 which, in the
face of slowing economic growth, “imposed on the regions greater obligations”
for social spending. That in turn has led to a structural imbalance in regional
budgets equal to 1.5 to 2.0 percent of the country’s GDP as a whole.

Neither addressed the political
consequences of these economic problems, but they are obvious: if Moscow is
cutting the regions lose to face their own problems as far as the economy is
concerned, at least some people in some of the regions of the country may begin
to think seriously about cutting themselves off politically from a capital so
obviously out of touch.

Staunton, January 30 – Pro-Moscow
groups have launched websites for a so-called Latgale Peoples Republic in
southeastern Latvia and a so-called Vilnius Peoples Republic around the capital
of Lithuania, steps that represent no real movements in either case but that
create serious problems for the governments of the two countries.

On the one hand, if Riga and Vilnius
dismiss these actions as inventions, that will likely trigger a nationalist
backlash among some members of the titular nationalities, thus creating or
exacerbating relations among the ethnic groups of those countries and under
mining social cohesion.

And on the other, if the Latvian and
Lithuanian governments come down hard on these Internet developments, many in
Moscow will present such overreactions as evidence that these regimes are not
the stable democracies their EU and NATO allies know them to be and thus call
into question the support these regimes enjoy in the West now.

Because Moscow or at least the Putin
regime wins if either of these things happen, it is almost certain that these
pages were launched not by homegrown minorities who may see the Donetsk and
Luhansk “peoples democracies” as a model but by the Russian backers of those
ideas whose paymasters view them as a means of destabilizing Russia’s
neighbors.

The
Latvian security police point out that the Latgale site is promoting secession
and thus benefits Russia rather than Latvia, and Edgar Trusevic, a leader of
the Polish community of Lithuania in the name of which the “Wileńska Republika Ludowa” site has been launched, views
this site as a Russian provocation with which no one in Lithuania would have
anything to do.

Yet
another indication that Moscow is behind both these measures is the media
campaign about these two sites and the response of the two Baltic governments
that has begun in the Russian capital. For an example of this, which also
includes citations to other articles, see

Also
suggestive of Russia’s direct involvement with these sites is an article by
Anton Grishanov, a Moscow analyst, who argues that the Donetsk and Luhansk
peoples republics constitute a new model of secession as a form of integration that
can and should be extended elsewhere (actualcomment.ru/embrion-donbasskoy-diplomatii.html).

Although
no analogous page has yet been launched for some entity in Estonia, those
behind such ideas have not forgotten the northernmost Baltic country: This
week, the Donetsk Peoples Republic appealed to predominantly Russian-speaking
city of Narva in northeastern Estonia for assistance against what it said were Kyiv’s
“crimes.”

Despite
Narva’s status as a sister city of Donetsk, the city government turned them
down flat saying that “there is no mandate to open communications with the new
powers,” although one city official, Vyacheslav Konovalov, indicated that Narva
might be ready to help the population in Ukraine (news.err.ee/v/politics/39e38599-4bc1-4c80-aa97-f870b56dc120).

Staunton, January 30 – Russians like
other people are “too lazy to hate anyone for very long,” according to Moscow
ethnographer Igor Savin. Instead, “after a few months,” they will shift the
object of their xenophobia from one group to another, sometimes as a result of
official actions and other times as a result of their own experiences.

A few people do hate this or that
group more or less permanently, the researcher at the Institute of Oriental
Studies says, but most, while they seem to need to focus on some kind of enemy
to define themselves, seldom do so, shifting the object of their dislike or
hatred from one to another over time (novayagazeta.ru/society/67053.html).

Consequently,
their current “hatred” of Ukrainians is unlikely to last more than a few
months, just as their earlier hostility to immigrants from Central Asia or
hatred of Georgia in 2008, Savin told the Moscow paper’s Elena Racheva in the
course of an extensive interview in today’s edition.

The
ethnographer’s conclusions are the product of his participation in a year-long
study he and his colleagues have carried about concerning relations between
native Muscovites and Central Asian gastarbeiters, a study that involved more than
40 focus groups as well as in-depth interviews with members of both groups.

“Everyone
has always had the need to channel hatred,” he says. The difference in how that
happens often depends on whether “government and social institutes extinguish
it” by one means or another or “in our case, use it” for their own purposes and
thus legitimize and intensify it.

“The
level of migrantophobia has declined” over the past year, he says, with “half
of the phobia and that not to a high degree now directed at Ukraine,” a shift
he says that has little to do with the experiences of people but rather with the
efforts of the media to direct anger away from one group and toward another.

There
are no non-xenophobes, Savin argues, because “people who do not experience some
form of distrust to other groups, real or imagined, do not exist.”Russians have been unwilling to face up to
that fact in large measure because they continue to “exaggerate the
internationalist quality of Russia” that supposedly was inherited from Soviet
times.

In
reality, he continues, “in the USSR there were so few ‘others’ present” in
Russian cities that “all Soviet nationalism was controlled.” There were simply
too few targets of opportunity as it were. Immigration has only been a serious
thing over the last decade, and “people still haven’t reached an understanding
as to how they should think about it.”

The
government could help calm the situation if it would be honest and say that “’we
have few citizens and we need new human material, however cynical that sounds.”Immigrants thus play a valuable role, and “if
they do not violate the law, then they are equal to us in the rights but also
equal in their responsibilities.”

“I
also say to colleagues: we do not need migrantophilia or migrantophobia; we
need migrantorealism. Migrants are also people: they act according to the very same
laws” that others do.Moreover, he says,
migrants in Moscow typically say they are being treated “better than is in fact
the case” because they do not want to exacerbate the situation.

Asked
who is the object of Russian dislike now, Savin cities the findings of a 2013
poll.At that time, Russians identified
Belarusians and Russians as those closest to them and against whom they felt
the least hostility. “Following them were the Jews, then the Armenians and the
Georgians. Then, the Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Tajiks.”

And
the three groups Russians at that time said they felt the greatest xenophobia
aobut were the Chinese, the Chechens and the Roma. “Certainly,” their attitudes
toward Ukrainians have changed, Savin says, “but what is surprising is
something else. In 2007-2008, there was an anti-Georgian campaign, and it
seemed that Russians would hate Georgians forever.”

But
only a couple of years later, most Russians viewed the Georgians in a positive
light, and almost none of them saw that Caucasian people as an enemy.

Staunton, January 30 – Yesterday, in
“Der Spiegel,” that German publication’s Moscow correspondent Benjamin Bidder
asked the question: “Does Putin Believe His Own Propaganda?” and suggested the
best answer to that riddle has been provided by Moscow cartoonist Sergey
Yolkin, who described Putin’s statements as an example of “hybrid truth.”

Since returning for his third term, Putin has made
dishonesty and lies “practically a daily element of Russian policy,” employing “the
big lie” as part of a conscious effort to define the situation and “small lies”
in the Kremlin leader’s speeches which raise the question: “Is he only poorly
informed or does he believe his own propaganda?”

In the summer of 201, Putin tried to convince German
Chancellor Angela Merkel that protests against him in Moscow were “manifestations
of ‘the sexually deformed’” and that those involved in the Pussy Riot actions
were “anti-Semites,” statements so at variance with reality and so unnecessary that
his German audience was shocked.

Most recently but in the same key, Bidder continues,
Putin told students in St. Petersburg that pro-Russian separatists in the
Donbas were “fighting not with the Ukrainian army but with ‘a NATO legion.’”
One might expect such things from lower level propagandists but “not from the
senior leader of a major nuclear power.”

According to the German correspondent, “it is unclear
what stands behind such expressions.” Was Putin consciously lying? Was he
poorly informed? Or has he fallen under the spell of his own propaganda?There are cases which can provide evidence
for all of these possibilities, Bidder suggests.

Putin has clearly lied about key events in the course of the
Ukrainian conflict, denying what he had to know was true or asserting things that
he had to know were false, Bidder says. But he has also said things which show
that he has been poorly briefed – his assertions about the number of Ukrainians
in Russia, for example – or believes his government’s own propaganda.

But whatever is true in any particular case, one thing is
clear, Bidder argues. “In this way, the Kremlin sets the tone, and the Russian
media follow, in the big lies and the small. To the extent that Putin knows he
is lying, that is one thing – lies can be deployed as part of state policy –
but if he doesn’t, that raises an even more dangerous possibility: he doesn’t
know what he is saying and doesn’t care.

That he doesn’t know about many things, Bidder says, is
suggested by the following: Putin as is well known doesn’t like the Internet,
but as “The Guardian” reported last summer, he doesn’t want reports that are
longer than three pages in 18 point type. “This cannot be true,” the German
writer says.

But he adds: “Putin himself has said that he doesn’t have
the time to read newspapers” and gets most of his news and information from
subordinates, although he does “watch television.”That means, Bidder says, that “reality
reaches the leader of the Kremlin only after being filtered through his own
propaganda.”

And that in turn means, although Bidder doesn’t say so,
that Putin is seeing his own lies multiplied and confirmed rather than
challenged and corrected, a dangerous situation for anyone but especially
dangerous in the case of a ruler who has invaded a neighboring state and put
his own country at odds with the world.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Staunton, January 29 – No one should
be surprised that Russia is rapidly turning to fascism, according to Mikhail
Yampolsky. It is simply “the delayed reaction to the disintegration of the
empire,” a delay occasioned by the growth in consumption made possible by high
oil prices. As such, Russia today is simply recapitulating what happened in
Weimar Germany.

But that recapitulation is taking
place not simply at the systemic level, the Russian analyst says, but at the
psychological level as well – and an appreciation of the recapitulation at that
level helps to explain a great deal of what is going on in Russia at the
present time (colta.ru/articles/specials/6088).

“It is well known that Nazism also
was a reaction to defeat in war, the disintegration of an empire, and the rapid
loss of Germany’s significance in the world,” Yampolsky says. “Fascism and a
sense of national denigration are closely connected phenomena,” and the
psychoanalytic perspective on this offered by Melanie Klein is suggestive.

The late Austrian psychoanalyst
demonstrated that “weakness, poverty and a sense of denigration leads to a
so-called projected identification” that in turn is linked to a paranoid-schizophrenic
position” in which individuals or groups project unto others the very qualities
they do not approve of or want to face in themselves.

Thus, Yampolsky says, Russians today
“systematically accuse Ukrainians of fascism,” while “their own movement toward
fascism is excluded by the fictional idealization of its form.”

But
the ways in which the current Russian situation resembles that of Germany in
the 1920s are “not exhausted by that,” the analyst says. Russia’s pace now is “complicated
by the paradoxes of post-imperial victimization,” even though Russia viewed
from the side doesn’t appear to fit “the role of victim.”

Nevertheless, Yampolsky
points out, “Russia constantly asserts that it is the victim of aggression. The
former republics having gained their independence feel themselves as it were
much better. Ukrainians, the victims of Russian aggression, for example, are
experiencing a period of growth of self-consciousness and a moment of birth of
a feeling of their own worth,” even as Russia is mired in a sense of being
denigrated by others.

According to the Russian analyst, Russians are finding it easier to do
so because of a shift in historiography in Europe over the last two
generations.In the past, it was common
ground that history is always written by the victors and the victims are
forgotten. But after World War II, as a result of the Holocaust, history
increasingly has been written about the victims rather than the victors.

That has had an impact on Russian thinking. Yampolsky
gives as an example the fact that “ever more books” are appearing about “how
Soviet soldiers in occupied Germany raped and stole, and these ‘unwelcome’
researches are becoming if you will no less significant than an analysis of the
strategy of Marshal Zhukov.”

Such dramatic shifts from warrior to
victim, “from war to civilian life are accompanied by a shift in the
understanding of sovereignty” and to the significance which those in the Kremlin
give it.In the past, sovereignty meant
the right to change laws and begin war, but now, those opportunities have been
seized by sub-state actors like Al-Qaeda and ISIL.

It is in this context that the Russian campaign to
overcome its “post-imperial trauma” has arisen, and that helps to explain “the
extraordinary significance of Crimea to Putin” because of “the absence of
victims” and the role of “’the polite men,’ victors who did not shed innocent
blood.”

The Donbas campaign immediately called that into
question, and it quickly became apparent that it “could not produce a single
heroic figure” who could be used to promote the Crimean goals. That is because “the
formation of fascist consciousness needs an esthetic phase” with marches,
films, and “a demonstration of force and unity.”

“The contemporary era,” Yampolsky
points out, “is completely insensitive to making aggression and force heroic.” And that has led to what appears internally
inconsistent but in fact is totally consistent: “the present-day Russian
fascist is all-powerful” at least as presented by propaganda “and at the same
time a victim being pursued.”

The Russian analyst makes another important point about
the specific features of the rise of fascism in Russia as far as the individual
personalities of its population are concerned. He begins by observing that
human beings are members of groups but their identities and behaviors are
determined by the nature of groups of which they are members.

.He cites the observation of
British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who suggested that groups can be divided between
“working groups” and “basic assumption groups.”The first is directed at fulfilling a specific task, presupposes
cooperation, and is the predominant form in democratic societies.

That dominance, Yampolsky
suggests, “explains their ability to engage in mass actions of solidarity such
as that recently demonstrated by the manifestations in support of Charlie
Hebdo.”

Russian society, however, “cultivates
‘basic assumption groups,’” in which the paranoid-schizophrenic position Klein
described dominates, in which “illusion rules” and where the members reject the
differentiation which is accepted from the outset in the working groups of
democratic societies.

The primary task of these “’basic
assumption groups’” is “the rejection of one’s own ego and fusion in some
narcissistic and undifferentiated unity.” The members of such groups are intolerant
of any deviation “from united thought and behavior” and thus are often
infantile, given to leader worship, and enormously destructive.